Tagged with “and”
(29)

Marketing Intercom with Jobs-to-be-Done | Matt Hodges on Jobs-to-be-Done Radio

Chris Spiek

//

03.31.15

This week Matt Hodges, Intercom’s head of marketing, joins us to talk about integrating Intercom’s marketing efforts around Jobs-to-be-Done.

Matt talks us through his experience of uncovering the jobs that Intercom is hired to do, and applying the learning to things like SEO, landing page design, and website architecture.

He takes us into the details of putting together landing pages and product tours that were highly focused on the job (as opposed to a vertical, persona, or customer segment), and gives us some insight into how he uses jobs and personas for different marketing activities.

Your design has to work within that tiny rectangle, because unlike other designed objects, a flag is usually seen at a distance. It is also often in motion and partially obscured.

[Credit: hugovk]

Given those limitations, it’s surprising how simple and compelling.

Vexillologists—those who study flags—tend to fall into one of two schools of thought. The first is one that focuses on history, category, and usage, and maintains that vexillologists should be scholars and historians of all flags, regardless of their designs.

The other school of vexillology, however, maintains that not all flags are created equal, and that flags can and should be redesigned, and improved.

Ted Kaye of the Portland Flag Association—the largest subnational flag organization in the country—is one such vexillologist. Kaye has a word for these activist vexillologists of his ilk who go out into the world and lobby for more beautiful flags: “vexillonaires.”

[Flag of the Portland Flag Association.]

You’ll remember from episode #6 that the principles of flag design, according to the North American Vexillological Association, are:

Keep it simple

Use meaningful symbolism

Use two to three basic colors

No lettering or seals of any kind.

Be distinctive

For some reason, cities of the United States seem to have a lot of trouble with principle #4.

The city of Portland, Oregon, didn’t have an official flag until 1969, when a group proposed a flag to the commercial club of portland. Portland’s mayor at the time brought in the Portland Arts Commission, which brought in local graphic designer Doug Lynch to work on the flag. Lynch asked the stakeholders what was important to them in a flag, and also did his own search for powerful visual imagery for the city.

Lynch came up with an abstract flag design, with blue lines representing the Columbia and Williamette rivers, bordered by stripes of gold representing commerce or grain growing along the rivers, all flowing into a white four-pointed star representing the city. The background color, green, represents the forests.

The city council took Lynch’s flag design and plopped a city seal on it. The flag was rarely flown.

[Portland’s first city flag. Courtesy of Ted Kaye.]

Nearly thirty years later, Doug Lynch, then in his mid-eighties, went to a meeting of the Portland Flag Association. Lynch explained the story of his botched flag to the gathering of vexillologists. At the end of the presentation, Lynch talked all about the changes he wanted to make to the flag (including taking the seal off), and regretted that there was nothing he could do about it.

The vexillologists—nay, vexillonaires—sprang into action. This elite team of historians, manufacturers, and designers agreed to come together on behalf of fixing Portland’s flag. They went to Portland city council and testified on the flag’s behalf. The new/old flag was adopted a week later, and it’s been representing Portland ever since.

[Portland’s new and improved city flag.]

Roman Mars spoke with vexillologist and vexillonaire Ted Kaye at his home in Portland. When Roman arrived, he found that Ted had flown the San Francisco flag in Roman’s honor, because that’s what kind of guy Ted Kaye is.

Mandy Brown is a wordsmith. She takes other people’s words and hammers them into shape.

Mandy edited Frank Chimero’s The Shape Of Design. She has edited articles for A List Apart and books for A Book Apart (including the particularly handsome first book).

More recently, Mandy assembled a dream team to work on her startup Editorially, an online platform for collaborative writing and editing. That didn’t work out in the end, which is a shame because it was a lovely piece of work.

Before that, Mandy worked as product lead at Typekit, whipping their communications into shape.

She is one of the Studiomates crew in Brooklyn, where she lives with her husband, Keith and her dog, Jax. They’re both adorable.

Podcast time again. This time with old dogs Naji El-Arifi and Dan Sherratt from Somo accompanied by young pup Jon Darke from Every Interaction.

It’s hard to deny that ‘wearables’ are the hottest subject in tech at the moment. We try to shed some light on the issues designing for wearables, what’s stopping them from becoming mainstream, and which company is best poised to lead the market.

Andy Budd is an internationally renowned user experience designer and web standards expert from Clearleft. In his speech at the Future of Web Design conference in London he compares the user experience of websites to various real life examples. He highlights the importance of user experience in web design with some useful little tips that can be put into effect on your future projects.

This week on Tech Weekly with Aleks Krotoski and Guardian technology editor Charles Arthur discuss profit warnings and dark clouds above the makers of Blackberry phones RIM (Research In Motion) and the announcement of a write down on the value of Microsoft’s online advertising service aQuantive. Also Aleks talks to the author Andrew Blum about his new book Tubes: Behind the Scenes at the Internet which sets out to explain what the internet is made of and why it’s important for us to think about how we purchase access to the web.

What’s the best way to handle responsive images? There’s been a lot of discussion flying around over the last many months, big debates and fast changes… where have we landed? What’s coming in the future? Responsive Images Community Group chair Mat Marquis joins Jen Simmons to sort it all out.